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Some thoughts on Procrastinating

Since it is the April 15th deadline for filing my income taxes, I thought that instead of doing what I should be doing I’d make a post here on my blog about my tendency to procrastinate. There are certain pivotal moments in the year where this tendency becomes quite evident. Today is one of them, and Christmas is another.

I’ll be filing for a procrastinator’s extension on my income tax return. I’ve had all the materials assembled in a folder since about the second week in February and have put off getting down to the task of putting them into Turbo Tax and sending them off, not because I expect to have to pay any additional taxes (in fact, I anticipate getting a refund) but because I dread doing things that I must do. It’s a congenital deformity in my psyche, I’m sure. The fact that something must be done by a certain date seduces me into believing, or acting as if I believe, I must do it exactly on that date. I realize the fallacy of that thinking, but I seem powerless to resist it. ‘Taint something I’m proud of, but it is something I’m aware of after these many years of seeing it in action.

So now I must stop this doing-anything-but-what-I-have-to-do behavior and at least fill out the one page that I have to get into the mail before the deadline tonight, so that I can buy myself another 4 months in which to dread and obsess about my tax return. It’s interesting to contemplate what I might have accomplished during my lifetime if I had only done things I dread doing early and gotten them out of the way, but that just doesn’t seem to be my style.